Mon 26 Jul 2010
Food for Thought
Posted by under Business Risk , Health & Safety , Regulation , Food safety , Food-borne illnessNo Comments
An op-ed by author Eric Schlosser in Saturday’s New York Times focused on the issue of food-borne illness and called on the U.S. Senate to pass food safety legislation.
Estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) quoted by Schlosser indicate the scale of the problem:
Every day, about 200,000 Americans are sickened by contaminated food. Every year, about 325,000 are hospitalized by a food-borne illness. And the number who are killed annually by something they ate is roughly the same as the number of Americans who’ve been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2003.”
Schlosser went on to observe that while the elderly and people with compromised immune systems face an elevated risk from food borne pathogens like listeria, campylobacter and salmonella, by far the most vulnerable group are children under the age of four.
The economic cost of the problem is also huge. A recent study sponsored by Pew Charitable […]
Read the rest of this great post here